Epilogue

[But sort of! Kabbalistic marriage seems to have some hidden features we didn’t realize. All those nights looking for clues in the Bible and we missed a doozy.]

[Should have checked Poe instead.]

[Poe?]

[“And not even the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, could ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Anna – ]

[Get a room, you two!]

[Erica?!]

[Surprised to see me here?]

[Yes!]

[I think I died just before Ana did. It seems to have put me inside Ana’s head, and then when Ana transferred into your head, I came with her.]

[There are two different other people inside my head?!]

[Hoo boy, mi compadre, you are not going to like this]

[What? How? Uh, do any of you know what’s going on here?]

[I DO NOT KNOW IF I AM INCLUDED IN “ANY OF YOU” BUT I THINK I HAVE A PRETTY GOOD IDEA. CONSIDER RABBI SHIMON’S WRITINGS ON THE FIVE LEVELS OF THE SOUL. THE FIRST, THE NEFESH, REPRESENTS PHYSICAL LIFE. THE SECOND, THE RUACH…]

[Uriel! What did I tell you about infodumping directly into people’s minds?]

[I DO NOT REMEMBER, BUT I ASSUME IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT IT BEING VERY EFFICIENT]

[Sohu?!]

[Yeah, when Father killed me, I think I ended up in your mind too. And Uriel with me.]

[So…Ana…Erica…Dylan…Sohu…Uriel…is there anyone else I should know about?]

[Aaaaaaron, you thought you were going to marry everyone except me but I ended up inside your head aaaaannnyway.]

[Sarah? How! I thought you were part of THARMAS]

[I am. THARMAS is with us too. When it was destroyed, we ended up in Sohu, and when she died, we ended up in you. Now we’re together forevvvvvver]

[I’m stuck with seven people in my head?!]

[ACTUALLY, I BELIEVE THE CURRENT SITUATION IS UNSTABLE AND WE WILL GRADUALLY MERGE INTO A SINGLE ENTITY]

[How gradually?]

[Which of you said that?]

[Wait, which of us said that?]

[Aaron, was that you?]

[Sort of]

[Who are we?]

[Adam Kadmon]

[Albion]

[Albion? Who?]

[ALBION-EST, I’M NOT ENTIRELY SURE YET]

[That wasn’t a knock-knock joke!]

[I AM ALMOST CERTAIN THAT IT WAS. ALSO, “IT IS ALBION-D MY UNDERSTANDING]

[All be one and one be all!]

[Wait a second, no, merging into a superorganism with you guys was the worst mistake of my life and I hope I die. Die again. Super-die. Whatever.]

[In William Blake’s prophecies, Albion was the entity formed at the end of time, when all of the different aspects of the human soul finally came together to remake the world.]

[Remake the world?]

[The Comet King will speak the Explicit Name to reshape Hell. But here on Earth, things aren’t great either. Physics is broken, the world is collapsing, the apocalypse is in full swing. We need to make things right. The Comet King told us the Name was a notarikon encoded in the speech Metatron gave Ana. Now all we need to do is speak it.]

[No one except the Comet King can speak the Shem haMephorash!]

[No one except him could speak it. No one except him could see the whole universe at once, understand its joints and facets, figure out how it needed to be broken and remade. But we’re part supercomputer.]

[Yes. This isn’t a coincidence. A supercomputer. An encyclopaedic knowledge of kabbalah and the secret structure of the universe. A passion for revolution. And an answer to the problem of evil. This is what we were made for.]

[There’s someone else we need.]

We all realized it. We all paused, reflecting on what had to be done. We all agreed.

There are many summoning rituals, but one is older and purer than the others. Speak of the Devil, and he will appear.

“Thamiel,” I said.

He appeared before us. Exhausted, wounded, still bleeding ichor from a thousand cuts and bruises. He leaned on his bident like a crutch, limped towards us.

“It’s time,” I said.

The second head turned to me, and the floodgates opened. It started crying and crying, like it would never stop. Finally, it asked, almost as if it didn’t dare hope, “Is it really?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Did I do good?” it asked.

I didn’t answer.

“So many centuries,” it pled. “So much misery, so many tears, so many years of suffering. You couldn’t imagine it, nobody could imagine it, but I did what God wanted, I did my duty, but you have to tell me, please, at the end of everything, did I do good?”

I thought about everything I had witnessed. I thought back to Malia Ngo, the scariest person I had ever met, scarier in her way than the Comet King even. I thought of her last revelation, that even though she was the daughter of Thamiel, everything she had done, she had done for the love of good. I thought of Dylan Alvarez, who I had known only as a bogeyman on the news shows. He too had only wanted to do what was right. And I thought of the Other King, the crimson-robed monster who had killed the Cometspawn with barely a second thought, and how everything he did he had done out of love. I thought of all the villains I had feared, revealed to be unsung heroes all along. And with a jolt, I realized that it was all true, the tzimtzum, the shattering of the vessels, the withdrawal of divinity to hide God from himself. I started to laugh. The dark facet of God, call it evil, call it hatred, call it Thamiel, was hollow, more brittle than glass, lighter than a feather. I started laughing that Ana had wasted her question on the existence of evil, when evil was thinner than a hair, tinier than a dust speck, so tiny it barely even existed at all. Evil was the world’s dumbest joke, the flimsiest illusion, a piece of wool God pulled over His own eyes with no expectation that it could possibly fool anybody.

I didn’t say anything to Thamiel.

He sobbed, then handed me the bident. I took it from its far end, the two points in my two hands, the single-pointed end facing the Devil. A unident. He kept sobbing. I held the unident undaunted. Finally, I thrust it at him, and he disappeared, a puff of smoke, a thread too weak to hold.

[Are you ready?] I asked myself.

[Let’s go] I answered.

I thought again of all I had seen, all I had hoped. Everything that could have been different and everything that couldn’t have been other than it was. I thought of God’s garden of universes, growing out there somewhere, staggering the imagination. I thought of God, and Adam Kadmon, and Thamiel, and the divine plan. My thoughts unfolded into dreams and blueprints and calculations, and I held all of them in my mind at once, a vision like a perfect crystal, a seed transformed into something new and wonderful. I felt a fearsome joy, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I felt the heart of Adam Kadmon beating within me, freed of its constraints at last, a fervent wish to reshape and redeem itself.

My voice only wavering a little, I spoke the Explicit Name of God.

Thank you for reading Unsong.

I have a few extra things I need to take care of. I promised some people a tosafot, and I’m thinking of a couple other very small projects as well. I also have Vague Long-Term Plans to publish this in some more serious way. If you want to be kept up-to-date, please subscribe to the mailing list using the box at the top right of the page.

I have gotten some very vague expressions of interest from some people who claim to represent publishers, and I’ll be gradually looking into those in a way that might take a long time to bear any fruit. In the meantime I will not be authorizing an official print copy. If other people want to make an ebook version, or small-scale non-public print copies in ways that don’t seem like obvious defections against future publishers, I’m okay with that. If you want updates on this kind of thing, subscribe as mentioned above.

There’s a video of me reading the final chapter up here (thanks Sophia!) and a video of me reading the Epilogue here (thanks Ben!)

Thanks also to everyone who attended the wrap party, thanks to the person who gave me some prints from William Blake’s illustrations of the Book of Job, thanks to the person who gave me a full-size functional bronze copy of the sword Sigh, and thanks (I think) to the person who hid six (possibly seven, if we still haven’t found one?) purple Beanie Baby dragons in the house where we had the afterparty. It is not my house and the people who live there are very confused.

Most of you probably know this, but I also write nonfiction and occasional short stories on my other blog, Slate Star Codex. There’s still the Unsong subreddit for anyone who wants to talk about the book more. And you might enjoy some of the other fiction on r/rational.

But actually, I’m a bit confused over Thamiel’s end. Did he join them (which doesn’t seem to be implied), or was he destroyed (which does, but doesn’t explain them saying they needed him), or did they think they needed him and then understand they didn’t (which feels like me overinterpreting)?

Can you help me match them up? It’s pretty clear what sephirot are Dylan (orange), Anna (yellow), Uriel (violet), and I’m guessing Erica is green (she’s a singer). Is Sohu black because she can wield Sigh? What are THARMAS and Sarah? They are both computers…which one prays and which one is just the natural?

Sarah and THARMAS merged, so presumably only correspond to one sep̱irah between them. The black sail responded to the blood of Thamiel, so I would have thought he’d correspond to Geḇurah. Sohu is cometspawn, so she corresponds to Malkuṯ.

And I had to watch the video to get this final and best knock-knock joke so maybe this entire epilogue is hard for me to figure out for some reason.

I’m guessing the second head of Thamiel was just an actor up to this point playing their role, like the other unsung heroes. To make it look like evil had a chance but God always wins in the end: Will god win? Yes.

As R. Judah expounded: In the time to come the Holy One, blessed be He, will bring the Evil Inclination and slay it in the presence of the righteous and the wicked. To the righteous it will have the appearance of a towering hill, and to the wicked it will have the appearance of a hair thread. Both the former and the latter will weep; the righteous will weep saying, “How were we able to overcome such a towering hill!” The wicked also will weep saying, “How is it that we were unable to conquer this hair thread!” And the Holy One, blessed be He, will also marvel together with them, as it is said, “Thus says the Lord of Hosts, If it be marvelous in the eyes of the remnant of this people in those days, it shall also be marvelous in My eyes” (Zechariah 8:6).

I think the robes should remain crimson, since Sigh (according to Chapter 29) is silver and black.

Why? Because Silver Crimson Black is the title of a song by Zack Hemsey off of his album Ronin. The term “rōnin” refers to a disgraced masterless samurai. This seems like an apt description of the Other King up until the final chapter, where he finally commits seppuku. NIEAC

If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless.

Thanks for writing Unsong! It was quite a ride. 🙂 My own reading-out-loud project (which depends on the whims of the person I am reading it to!) is only about halfway through at this point, but my personal reading has finished, and I enjoyed your book a lot.

I’m jealous, in an admiration sort of way – your book’s definitely better than mine. 🙂

Unsong is not a novel; it is an epic poem. It is a long-winded series of puns, cultural remarks, and meditations on the nature of good and evil. It defies many standard rules of narrative fantasy, and as such it should not be compared to epic fantasies like LotR, HP, or even the natural web serial archetype, Worm. Its protagonists are little more than sightseers, the plot is full of contingencies, and the mechanics of the universe is discussed either in so much detail that it is contradictory (cf. the many kabbalistic analyses of multiple songs), or in so little detail that it feels uncomfortable (who gets to enter Hell or Heaven? why does Metatron play one of the most active roles in the plot despite the angels claiming that he does nothing?). But to fault Unsong for this feels wrong, too: it is a light-hearted showcase of thoughts, not a philosophical tract or a novel of an established author, and the fact that it makes us sad or happy or thoughtful despite the lack of clear narrative structure is a great success of this narrative form.

Oh, I’d be curious to hear why. As far as I know, no other web novel matches it in scope, and perhaps not even in the sheer amount of detailed world-building. The style could use a lot of improvement but I didn’t think it was unreadable.

There’s a character in A Canticle for Leibowitz, the classic pioneering post-apocalyptic story, who has two heads, one normal head and one deformed smaller head. The smaller head doesn’t speak until the very end of the story IIRC.

It’s a common religious sentiment that the greatest and deepest desire of a follower is to finally make it to the end and be told, with finality, that they’d done good. Validation. I know the above quote was dear to a lot of people I grew up going to church with.

Scott, thanks for writing this extraordinary and original book. For the last 72 Sundays and Wednesdays, I’ve waited eagerly for the next chapter or interlude to drop, like someone New Zealand in the 19th century waiting for the ship carrying the mail with the magazine containing the next chapter of a Dickens novel. And thank you to the community of commenters which sprung up and explained all of the references I didn’t get, you’re all great.

“Nothing looked different except Sohu’s eyes, which glassed over for a split second.” That was in chapter 62- was there an explanation for this I missed?

Also, how did you guys realise beforehand that the initial letters of the chapters were spelling out the Explicit Name? Was there a hint in the text I missed or is this a well-known device in Jewish literature?

Ok, so OBVIOUSLY there is some complex Kabbalah behind the 7 souls in one body, but I can’t work it out.

“[Yes. This isn’t a coincidence. A supercomputer. An encyclopaedic knowledge of kabbalah and the secret structure of the universe. A passion for revolution. And an answer to the problem of evil. This is what we were made for.]”

The eight souls form the four zoas that make up Albion. Each one is male with a female ’emanation’. The four of them are Tharmas/Enion (THARMAS/Sarah [an NE-1 MacBook]), Los (iron smith/storyteller) /Enitharmon (Aaron/Ana Thurmon), Luvah/Vala (Dylan/Erica who was supposed to be named Valerie or something since there’s also another thing called Orc which is really confusing) and Urizen/Ahania (Uriel/Sohu).

Each of the four zoas together represent one of those four features, so for example Erica and Dylan are two sides of the same coin of wild rebellion.

PS: I may have missed it somewhere, did anyone figure out why Sohu is named Sohu?

Aaron = Urthona, embodiment of inspiration and
creativity, also a blacksmith. one could use
blacksmithery as a metaphor for Aaron’s
wordsmithery.
Ana Thurmon = Enitharmon, counterpart of Urthona,
also embodiment of female dominion
and sexual restraints

This is quite good. I had found the last chapter disappointing, but this ties things together nicely. Thamiel was right that Jala was the Messiah ben Joseph. He meets an evil he cannot defeat, falls to evil himself, and dies. (And, in doing so, redeems Hell.) Meanwhile, in this chapter, we see the genesis of the Messiah ben David. A gestalt entity of human, angel, and machine that can redeem the world of the living.

The paragraph that ends with the gestalt dismissing evil as inconsequential initially confused me, but I think it’s saying that all these terrible things and horrible people had evil as a very small component of their motivation. The Other King leads a genocidal crusade, not because he’s a mustache-twirling villain, but because of love. Dylan wants attention and chaos and change. Even Thamiel it’s revealed was motivated not by sincere desire to increase evil, but by his duty to and love for God. About the only character who really believed in evil for its own sake was Sataniel (and I guess the other fallen angels) after Thamiel persuaded him of it. No wonder the gestalt dismisses evil so completely, if everyone else was so willing to give it up.

Even Sataniel was mostly motivated by curiosity. (“But what if we consider an alternative” isn’t particularly evil; the War in Heaven begins when the other angels reject even the possibility of considering these things.)

In Judaism something similar happens to the devil at the end of it all.

And both in judaism and in this book I’m left with sympathy for the devil. All other tragedies ended, those in hell redeemed, those in heaven happy as ever- everyone from the cometspawn to Malia Ngo to that weird supervisor in the first chapter gets a happy ending. But there’s just this one tragedy left, this one character who will never have a happy ending.

In a weird way, Thamiel becomes the kid in the Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas. The only entity in existence without a happy ending.

So, I’ve been mostly lurking in the comments while really enjoying Unsong and everyone’s interpretations and commentary, and I just have to ask: Are you Timothy Scriven from Liverpool who was in my writing class once? Because I used The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas in that class (an exercise on unusual viewpoints) and, you know, TINACBNIEAC.

The first verse refers to an airplane flight being delayed.
The night falls, since the delays stack up during the days,
and so the delays at nights are the worse.
As the airplane is coming “around”, circling towards SFO,
the world is “alive” with the cries of the babies who stayed
up passed their bedtime. They are still “outside” San Francisco,
and need to sleep soon.

Hence, “oooh, baby” — in the chorus — referring to the babies crying.
Heaven is a place of earth, since San Francisco is the domain
of the right hand of God — analogous to hell, the domain
of the left hand of God.

So it wasn’t a skabmom chain, it was a stack. Everyone in it obliged in dying in the correct sequence so that each remnant still had only one living, direct parter to revert into. Sohu and Ana were the root of the two branches, and Aaron was the common point. Dylan -> Erica -> Ana -> Aaron <- Sohu <- Uriel & Sarah. It also collapsed the situational knowledge into the right people at the right times to lead to the correct outcome.

Also, approximately all of the viewpoint characters and/or reasonable sources on them end up merging into Aaron, so he is the the narrative position to know, guess, or approximate everything that he narrates in the story. Very nice trick!

Well technically it would form a Dynkin diagram, just not a finite one. And that just wouldn’t be interesting — yeah, you could interpret it as a Dynkin diagram, but who cares? Maybe if it were still an affine diagram or something, but honestly that’s pushing it. But when it just happens to form one of the finite ones? And not, like, one that’s a simple pattern like A_n, but one of the exceptional ones? Has to mean something, obviously. 😛

And e_8 is a unique algebra. All other Lie algebras can be described as infinitesimal symmetries of certain spaces that preserve certain symmetries. But for e_8, the standard representation is also the adjoint representation. So the most compact way of describing e_8 is that it is the set of symmetries of e_8 that preserve the structure of e_8. It is, in a certain way, self-defining.

There is actually another Lie algebra that can be described in this way: The 0-algebra, so that last description of e_8 can be said to represent both the 0-algebra and e_8 itself. This is not a coincidence. We have already learned that God is One, so what better way to represent God than the 0-algebra, which contains precisely one element and has precisely one symmetry. The SKABMOM graph on the other hand represents Albion, the entity that remakes the world into ‘a thing of beauty that will glorify God’s holy name’. And of course, any good enough description of God is also a notarikon for His Most Holy Name.

All further kabbalistic implications are left as an exercise to the reader.

But just because *I didn’t want it to end* and also *I didn’t like Sarah at all*. But mind me, I’m just a reader and this has been by far one of the most interesting – if not *the most* – things I’ve read. I thank you oh so much for writing this up and sharing it. If it ever comes to buy the book or show you support somehow – by buying a beer for example. Count on me.

Congratulations Scott! I’ve never read a book quite like this before. I liked it very much.

The main new skill writers need to learn transitioning from short to long-form fiction is narrative pacing and tone. And you did fairly well even there, allowing the skills you’ve developed with shorter-form writing to shine on a competent architecture. A good editor could really bring some polish to this, and I would be thrilled to read it again if you end up publishing it in a more formal fashion.

I grew up learning all sorts of detail about Christian theology and history etc, and am now (roughly) agnostic, and from this perspective I’ve greatly admired the way you’ve used your upbringing in this work, even as you’ve moved in different directions with your belief structures.

I felt a fearsome joy, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I felt the heart of Adam Kadmon beating within me, freed of its constraints at last, a fervent wish to reshape and redeem itself.

My voice only wavering a little, I spoke the Explicit Name of God.

Now I’ve heard there was a sacred word
That Jala said, and it named the Lord
But you don’t really know of magic, or us
It goes like this – a tav, a resh
A fearsome joy, a fervent wish
The Comet King incanting haMephorash

How does a bastard, orphan, son of a maid and a
Comet, dropped in the middle of Colorado
by his father, half human and half other,
grow up to be a king and a crusader?

The would-be mosiach without a father
Got a lot farther by working a lot harder
By being a lot smarter
By being a self-starter
By age two, he was ready to be a kingdom founder

And every day while souls were being tortured and hurt
away deep down in Hell, he struggled to grow up faster
Inside, he was longing for something to be a part of
The brother was ready to beg, steal, hitch a ride from a padre

Then Thamiel came, and devastation reigned
Our man saw his nation drip, dripping down the drain
called his sword down from the heavens, picked a fight with Thamiel,
And he won his first battle, in his long war versus Hell

Well, the word got around, they said, “This kid is insane, man”
The people all saluted, made him ruler of the whole land,
“Shield us all from Hell and don’t forget from whence you came, and
The world’s gonna know your name. What’s your name, man?

Jalaketu Ben Kokhab
my name is Jalaketu Ben Kokhab
And there’s a million souls I have to save,
but just you wait, just you wait…

When he was twelve his daughter split, messed around with rivers
Two years later, Jala sends her, to Uriel he delivers
Sohu, sittin in a flying canoe, seasick
And Uriel was angry but Sohu learned quick

Moved in with father Ellis, the priest that gave him a ride,
and all his advisers to NORAD down deep inside
a mountain, saying I gotta fight for this land
He started planning and reading every treatise on the shelf

There would have been nothin’ left to do
For someone less astute
He woulda seen his people fall and fail
without a hope they could prevail
Started working, sailing on his beautiful sailboat
with sails in every colour and every magic that he could afford
searchin’ for every Name he can get his hands on
Plannin’ for the future see him now as he stands on
the bow of a ship, fighting in the name of good
Somebody had to, no one else would

Somebody had to, no one else would,
Somebody had to, no one else would,
Somebody had to, no one else would,
Someone –

Just you wait!

Jalaketu Ben Kokhab
We are waiting in the wings for you

You could never back down
You never learned to compromise!

Oh, Jalaketu Ben Kokhab

When America sings for you
Will they sing of the fallen bird?
Will they know you remade the world?
The world will never be the same, oh

Absolutely fantastic. Unsong has definitely earned a place in my all-time top ten list, which is mostly dominated by Lois Bujold, Roger Zelazny, and Terry Pratchett. Thank you so much for writing this intersection of three flavors of geekery I grew up with: Judaism, computers, and puns…I never thought I’d come across something that combined them all into one glorious, beautiful work of fiction. ^_^

I might just be dense here, but can you explain the significance of the unident trick? Is there some pun or kabbalistic meaning here that I’m missing? Why was it necessary for Aaron to use it as a unident rather than a bident? How did you see it coming?

I think it’s that since Thamiel represents duality, his bident destroys by taking things that should be unary and making them dual. To destroy Thamiel, then, a dual entity, he must be reunified. Hence flip the bident around so that it’s running from two to one, rather than one to two.

I just reread the chapter with the dinner at Ithaca, where Pirendiel gets very upset at the idea that Thamiel could in any way be a negative pole, an opposite of god, a being with equal (or nearly so) powers. He insists over and over that there is *one god*, and anyone suggesting there are two gods is wrong and blasphemous. So yeah, taking Thamiel’s bident, a symbol of duality, and flipping it into a single point to destroy him read to me as a symbolic reaffirmation that god is one, not two; an end to Thamiel and evil in general.

I think you could also say that Metatron and Thamiel “balance” each other (or would have, in a more perfect universe) – Thamiel representing God’s justice without mercy, punishing people eternally regardless of anything else, and Metatron representing God’s mercy without justice, being his representative in the world and allowing evil to run amok without hindrance. At the end, Metatron restores justice by dictating that God was, indeed, right and in control all along, and Thamiel returns to mercy by appearing repentant.

In other words, an exchange between Right and Left mediated by Teller (Tiferet).

Typo thread: many sentences in this thought-conversation are missing final punctuation. Some of these may be justified for stylistic reasons, but even then I’d fix at least the following as the most egregious:

[“And not even the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea, could ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Anna – ]

[I AM ALMOST CERTAIN THAT IT WAS. ALSO, “IT IS ALBION-D MY UNDERSTANDING]

Missing closing quotes.

[I DO NOT REMEMBER, BUT I ASSUME IT WAS SOMETHING ABOUT IT BEING VERY EFFICIENT]

[ACTUALLY, I BELIEVE THE CURRENT SITUATION IS UNSTABLE AND WE WILL GRADUALLY MERGE INTO A SINGLE ENTITY]

In the Israeli Unsong party, someone made a prediction that Sarah’s story is not done yet, that she “has not died” in TOK’s attack because that would be too anticlimatic and there are still things to resolve. He said he gives it 1:10 odds, so naturally I challenged him to bet on it, which we did.

The test we agreed on was “I pay him if Sarah finds (or maybe it was “uses”) at least one name in the Epilogue”.

Interestingly, I won the bet (winning ~$25) although his initial prediction was correct.

The Hebrew letters are tav, resh, he, he, yud, tav, mem, tav, vav, kuf….
I have no idea how to pronounce it, but for story purposes you pronounce it however you want to. As long as you associate a particular sound (or sentence, or for all we know dance move) with the correct letter, getting the sequence right counts as saying the name.

Yeah we know that, but there’s 62 letters we haven’t had translated. Sure, all the T’s so far have been tavs, but are any teths? If so, what are the rules for figuring out which T is which? F is likely under pei because Aaron brought that up in an epilogue ages ago, but it could be another vav letter. Do all the S’s become shins? Tsadis? Samekhs?! Some horrifying combination based on whether or not the word’s second letter is “h”? There’s ambiguity.

I was toying with the idea that the ambiguities could be resolved by both the presence/absence of “h” and the following vowel sound — e.g. perhaps “cake” would be kaph but “coke” would be qoph (that was how the Greeks used kappa/qoppa for a while, I hear).

I’m not sure if there’s enough evidence to determine the system in full. Someone should probably cross-compare (1) the first words of the chapters (2) the words of Metatron’s answer to Ana (3) the known Hebrew letters and (4) Aaron’s system of dream-mnemonics, see if there are any obvious patterns.

I thought back to Malia Ngo, the scariest person I had ever met, scarier in her way than the Comet King even. I thought of her last revelation, that even though she was the daughter of Thamiel, everything she had done, she had done for the love of good. I thought of Dylan Alvarez, who I had known only as a bogeyman on the news shows. He too had only wanted to do what was right.

I thought of all the villains I had feared, revealed to be unsung heroes all along.

DYLAN AN UNSUNG HERO?? ONLY WANTED TO DO WHAT WAS RIGHT??? JUDGE HIM COMPARABLE TO MALIA???? FIGHT ME.

I really like the story, but I feel like the ending came a bit too fast. One chapter everything seems normal, a few chapters later its already over. But maybe that’s just my impression.
What really saddens me is all the potential this world and system has that will never be explored. It’s just so unique and there could be so much more done with it.

On another note, what happened to Malia Ngo? As a demon, shouldn’t she have recoalesced in hell? And was she killed in the grand transformation.

After thinking about it for some time, I think I know why the end was unsatisfying: Because it resolves hardly anything and everyone is dead.
Seriously, almost every character except Aron died. Some of the people from his Singer cell might be an exception. And the People in his mind will soon cease to exist, unless they find a way around it. Also, the world is apparently pretty badly damaged after the apocalypse.
In other words, 90% of all the things introduced during the Book are gone. Most of the individuals stories are cut short.

Thank you, reb Alexander, this was a fast and enjoyable read. A few points of criticism, if I may.

1) This book is obviously not about UNSONG, it is about Comet King. Nothing wrong in naming a book after a secondary plot device, but it does seem a bit unsatisfactory. In addition, a large bureaucratic organization takes all the credit; not fair. I understand that within the book unsong has a different meaning — evil not as the absence of good, but for its own sake. The book is actually not about it either.

2) I would have enjoyed it better if it were more about Aaron and Ana. Kabbalistic marriage of minds is a thing requiring much more exploration. It was going the right way in Book I, but then sort of sagged. Comet King eclipsed everything. Biblical and Talmudic puns as courtship is real fun, then guys were put to test and something more should have come out of it. Obviously, just one reader’s preference.

4) By the way, what happened to archangel who was a comet who was the father of the Comet King? Everyone else is more or less accounted for, but, who was that? Raziel? (Not really important, just a thought)

Thanks for a great novel, I enjoyed and appreciated parts of this as much as I’ve ever enjoyed anyone’s writing. There is a lot that stands out; and this deserves to be published in a way that gets you paid if that’s where you want to go with it. I find myself a bit insatiafied with the ending, but that happens some times—I love Neal Stephenson’s work and he seems to always leave me in the lurch at the end. I’ll add myself to the crowd that doesn’t understand parts of it, and perhaps my liking if it will increase as some bits fall into place. Thanks for the introduction to Elisha Ben Abuyah!

“This is what we were made for…There’s someone else we need.” This made me think of Davepetasprite^2 who is presented as a potential opposition to the main antagonist in Homestuck, (s)he is a fusion of a bird and a man/woman, but they are missing the ‘Rage clown’ aspect, so if they combined with one of the halves of Gamzee as well as the Muse of Space (the cherubs are basically angels) they would ascend to be a true Space-Creation god of all four qualities, and could theoretically defeat the demon Lord English, who dominates their reality because he is part Time-Destruction god/angel, part machine, part clown (but he’s 100% male, so he can’t truly be an Adam Kadmon figure)

How Unsong influenced my life:
– whenever the database crashes, I catch myself thinking “Whoever is boiling a goat in its mother’s milk needs to stop, right now!”
– the admin user for one of the bases is named URIEL nowadays.
– I’ve almost convinced our architect to name the next ten servers after the ten sephiroths, just so we can have conversations like “oh, someone broke Malkuth. Again…”
– there is a package sized about 7000 lines of code in one of the schemas. Most of that code is things like data structure definitions, checks, preparing the temporary tables and so on. The actual procedure that does whatever this package is meant for is only about 10 lines of code though. This procedure is commented “THIS IS KABBALAH. THE REST IS COMMENTARY. HORRIBLE, PAINFUL COMMENTARY THAT MAKES THE SUPPORT TEAM CRY BLOOD TEARS…”

Yet another Unsong’s influence comes from the whole concept of nominative determinism. Reading contemporary Russian news after Unsong really makes me cringe, because one doesn’t even need any deep kabbalistic analysis to figure out that the names in the news don’t mean anything good. The most prominent ones that come to mind right away are Golodetz (“golod”, meaning “hunger” + “pizdetz”, a curse word meaning something between “shit happens” and “apocalypse”) and Nabiullina (switch two letters, and you get “Naibullina”, sounding like the word “nayebat'”, meaning “to swindle”) – a fitting name for a head of the Central Bank. Sometimes it makes me wonder whether they pick people with such names just to screw with our heads…

You’d need more separation between God and Metatron (not to mention God and the “divine” light) before the Answer could be anything but a logical absurdity. The extension of the halting problem – and therefore Rice’s Theorem – to Turing Oracle machines proves that God can’t search all possible worlds. Even with the most favorable assumptions, God can only prove the goodness of all worlds that are deist, lacking divine intervention.

I admit that if we say Metatron’s certainty was technically a lie – because he can’t know for sure, because God could only know for sure if He didn’t tell Metatron – that does improve the ending for me.

Unsong is a long, epic work. We got a ton of cool, fascinating stuff in the first few chapters, and a big, powerful, metaphorically significant confrontation in the last few. In between there was tons of clever world-building (and some outright tangents that were still very interesting), but not as much as I’d have hoped in the way of character development or plot. The story supports a ton of neat elements (and maybe one or two boring ones) but never quite cashes in on the most interesting aspects of the characters, themes, and setting. I enjoyed it for what it was, but I felt like it wanted to be– and could have been– something more.

I’ve mentally compared Unsong to plenty of different books. Foucalt’s Pendulum and Snow Crash are probably the front-runners as far as content goes. In terms of the overall features that I described, though, I think it has to be– appropriately enough– Moby Dick.

This was a wicked awesome and ridiculously creative story. I loved it.

That said (and not detracting from it), it bothers me that understanding everything as they did, nobody told the traumatized, screaming head of Thamiel that he did good. He deserves a hug for bearing the heaviest available burden for maximizing the total sum of good.

It is 12:28 AM on January 24th, 2017.
I have just finished reading the entirety of UNSONG in two days or one day. The counting depends on time or sleep.

I need to buy this as a book in a deliberate, well-designed shape to put it on my coffee table to have this inexplicable, awesome, wonder enshrined forevermore in my life. Probably in some equally inscrutable format.

And then have like three well-used paperback copies to loan people.

I do not understand this work, but I look upon it in awe.

It is 12:36 AM on January 24th, 2018. I have just finished writing this comment.

I’m going to run out of nesting at this rate. Mostly the point was going “nothing is ever a coincidence” and hoping that that resonated enough to get engagement from random Internet people. Eh. Anyway.

Okay, I think I missed something in an earlier chapter, and I’m hoping someone can set me straight: Why didn’t Sohu just use her “Marriage” with Uriel to telepathically warn him about the incoming missile, thus preventing his death and the apocalypse?

I can’t imagine the preparation and effort that must have gone into writing this, but the end result was so incredible. I can’t say for sure if it was all worth it to the author but I can definitively say that it was worth it to at least this reader. Thank you.

I am not a Good Man.
I have never dedicates myself to religion, though I follow my own moral code that seems to be in line with most of the society near me. I have never willingly read of the Holy Book to a large degree, I consider myself a rationalist. I also now consider myself truly happy to have read this.